Summer Residency

Jang - Oh Hong: Outer Space Embassy

2 until 24 September 2016

PV: 1 September, 7 - 9pm

Korean artist Jang-Oh Hong will take over the gallery space for Tenderpixel’s Summer Residency. Expanding the ideas of his solo exhibition at 17717 in Seoul, South Korea, earlier this year, the residency will culminate in a solo project, which will address some contemporary global concerns around citizenship, mobility and coexistence of diverse groups of people, through the Embassy for Parea*. Turning the gallery into a bureau-like architecture, the installation will be presented as a limbic space connected to another world. In fact, the embassy extends its jurisdiction outside our globe, towards the rest of the universe. By becoming an arena of negotiations and a space potential, it is revealing that another world is possible.

Framing the space with symbols of officiality, and hence carrying certain cliches that can be instantaneously recognised, the exhibition will bring visitors to acknowledge it as the diplomatic force acting on behalf of its home government. Hong speculates that even an otherworldly embassy, in order to be recognised as a legitimate entity, will have to take on the respected forms of our world. Evoking the vague image of a distant world, without fully giving away what this place and its inhabitants may be like, the Embassy for Parea highlights our ways of exoticising other cultures. Exposing processes such as representation and integration, the show reflects our relation to understanding ‘the Other’: ultimately providing a circumstance to welcome them for a better way of living together.

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*The name 'Parea' derives from the word, 'pareidolia', which is used to describe the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where that does not actually exist.